“Then give me my way,” Harriet begged, turning back again. She had forgotten the others already. “You said that after what happened between you and Austen you wanted it known how you felt to me. Haven’t I the same right and more, since it was my brother who said it, to want the world to know how I feel to you?”
They could feel the laugh in his reply. “The world, the world, as if you ever cared for what the world—come, be honest, Harriet; you say this in the generous desire of making it up to me.”
“But I do—I do care. I could clap my hands, I could glory to cry it from the house-tops, how I care, how I am here, on my knees, begging you will marry me.”
“You are kneeling? Yes? Kneel then; even that, since it brings you closer. But let’s not talk of this now. I’m not used to the knowledge of the first yet. Will you put your hand in mine, Harriet?”
The girl over in the shadow felt that her heart would break. And this was love. The great, sad thing was love!
He was talking again. “I never thought, surely, to be a stick of a man like this. I could have made a royal lover, Harriet. A man’s blood at forty is like wine at its fulness. My head—won’t lift—God, that it should come to find me like this! yet, kiss me, will you, Harriet?”
But a moment and she returned to her pleading. “They will send me away from you, you know, I have no right to be here—unless you give it to me?”
Was she using this, the inference, to move him?
For he caught it at once. “You came—I see, I see.”
But she had fled from her position. “It’s not that, as if I cared, as if you thought I cared, it’s because I want to have been—”